Ayelet Weisz
If you’re looking for native advertising tips that actually work, you’re not alone. Online advertising is not as easy as it used to be. If you plunge on without keeping these tips in mind, you stand to blow your advertising budget for no real impact in return.
They say you don’t understand how much something means to you until you no longer have it.
Like your Internet connection.
Admit it – you take it for granted.
You count on it and expect it to be there every time you turn on your computer or glance at your smartphone.
It’s not like back in the day, when you had to type your password every single time you wanted to use the Internet, then wait for the modem to connect while it chewed through static noises.
Back then, we were innocent. We were blinded by every shiny banner. We clicked. We converted. We converted so easy.
Since then, our brains have developed banner blindness. Your brain already knows that’s a banner on the sidebar, and that someone put it there to sell you something. So your brain tells you to ignore it and focus on the content.
You know the ads are there, but you don’t even notice them.
Native Advertising Tips that Beat Banner Blindness
Fortunately, banner ads aren’t the only way to go. Native ads, “a form of paid online content placement that matches the format and function of the publishing platform on which it appears” (according to Content Marketing Institute), is turning out to be a much more successful option.
Don’t take our word for it. Instead, take a look at these native advertising statistics from Content Marketing Institute and Advance Ohio:
- 43% of content marketers used native advertising in 2015.
- 53% called it very or extremely effective.
- 88-90% believed in native advertising effectiveness in driving action and building audiences.
But it only works if you do it right. Want to be part of the happy native advertising statistics? Use these native ads best practices to win audience love.
Effective Native Advertising Tip #1: Understand Your Target Audience
This isn’t only a native advertising best practices tip. You’ve probably read this a million times by now – you need to understand your target audience in order to write content that moves them enough to take action.
It should go without saying, but it’s doubly important in native advertising.
That’s because you don’t only need to understand your target audience, but the specific segment of it in the websites you’re targeting.
Say you want to advertise to an audience of travelers.
What kind of travelers are you targeting?
Some popular sites focus on family travel…
… while others focus on solo female travel.
If you look at business blogs, many of them might sound the same, but Bryan Harris’ VideoFruit blog (whose target audience are entrepreneurs) sounds like this:
For native ads best practices, it’s not enough to understand your target audience’s pain points. You also need to understand the type of language, tone, and visuals they best respond to.
Therefore, if you want to be one of the happy native advertising statistics, you should study the top sites in your industry before starting your campaign.
There’s another reason to do that.
Studying these sites will show you what’s missing, so you can offer even greater value than what’s already out there. Make your content look just like any other piece of content on the site so readers will stay open to it. Then surprise them with higher-than-average quality, and you’ll stand out from the crowd.
Effective Native Advertising Tip #2: Master the Art of Headlines
No matter how many native advertising tips you read, native ads effectiveness is dependent first on foremost on one key ingredient: your headline.
Other than quality, the only way you want to stand out from the site you’re advertising on is with headlines. You want to stay true to the usual headline style of the site, but you want to do it better. Therefore, you must become a master of headlines.
There are many ways to do that.
You can master headline strategies, like making a quantifiable promise to your readers, bringing them into the headline, keeping them curious with benefit-driven headlines, creating urgency, and building emotional value into your headlines, so readers can’t resist to click through and read.
With free, easy online tools and resources like 141 headline templates, , it’s easier to master the art of headlines than it seems.
